25 sats \ 2 replies \ @om 24 Apr \ parent \ on: "Federated" is nomenclature used by scammers to mislead the non-technical bitcoin
Not trustless, but m-of-n trusted under assumptions that the wallets work as intended. Fedimint gateways are trustless only under assumption that you trust the federation itself.
Indeed I have not independently verified that the 15 functionaries of Liquid are not the same person. For example, maybe the photos on https://liquid.net of the Nym guy are AI-generated and Nym is actually run by Blockstream. However, the m-of-n trust model is by definition broken if more than n-m parties are evil, and such a case does include the possibility that n-m+1 parties are actually one and the same. Users that worry about this possibility should either use fedimints run by their friends or investigate the Liquid federation more thoroughly than I did.
I think we're in agreement then that the purpose of a federation can only be to obfuscate the trusted party.